My Autobiography (29 page)

After his impassioned address, she spoke calmly as she looked into the fire. Her delivery had not the usual histrionics; her voice came from the embers of tragic passion. I did not understand a word, but I realized I was in the presence of the greatest actress I had ever seen.

*

Constance Collier, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s leading lady, was engaged to play Lady Macbeth with Sir Herbert for the
Triangle Film Company. When a boy I had seen her many times from the gallery of His Majesty’s Theatre and had admired her memorable performances in
The Eternal City
and as Nancy in
Oliver Twist
. So when a note came to my table at Levy’s Café that Miss Collier would like to meet me and would I come over to her table, I was delighted to do so. From that meeting we became lifelong friends. She was a kindly soul who had a glowing warmth and a zest for living. She enjoyed bringing people together. Her desire was to have me meet Sir Herbert and a young man named Douglas Fairbanks, with whom she said I would have much in common.

Sir Herbert, I suppose, was the dean of the English theatre and the subtlest of actors, appealing to the mind as well as the emotions. His Fagin in
Oliver Twist
was both humorous and horrific. With little effort he could create tension that was almost unbearable. He had only to gently prod the Artful Dodger jokingly with a toasting-fork to evoke terror. Tree’s conception of character was always brilliant. The ridiculous Svengali was an example; he made one believe in this absurd character and endowed him not only with humour but with poetry. Critics said Tree was beset with mannerisms; true, but he used them effectively. His acting was extremely modern. In
Julius Caesar
his interpretation was intellectual. His Mark Antony in the funeral scene, instead of haranguing the crowd with conventional passion, he spoke perfunctorily over their heads with cynicism and underlying contempt.

As a boy of fourteen I had seen Tree in many of his great productions, so when Constance arranged a small dinner for Sir Herbert, his daughter Iris and myself, I was indeed excited at the prospect. We were to meet in Tree’s rooms at the Alexandria Hotel. I was deliberately late, hoping that Constance would be there to relieve pressure, but when Sir Herbert ushered me into his rooms he was alone, except for John Emerson, his film director.

‘Ah, come in, Chaplin,’ said Sir Herbert. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Constance!’

After introducing Emerson, he explained that they were going over some scenes of
Macbeth
. Soon Emerson left, and I was suddenly petrified with shyness.

‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’ said Sir Herbert, sitting in an armchair opposite me. ‘We were discussing an effect for the witch scene.’

‘Oh-h-h,’ I stammered.

‘I think it would be rather effective to hang gauze over balloons and have them float through the scene. What do you think?’

‘Oh-h-h… wonderful!’

Sir Herbert paused and looked at me. ‘You’ve had phenomenal success, haven’t you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ I mumbled apologetically.

‘But you’re known all over the world! In England and France the soldiers even sing songs about you.’

‘Is that so?’ I said, feigning ignorance.

He looked at me again – I could see doubt and a reservation spreading all over his face. Then he got up. ‘Constance is late. I’ll telephone and find out what has happened. In the meantime you must meet my daughter Iris,’ he said, as he left the room.

I was relieved, for I had visions of a child with whom I could talk on my own level about school and the movies. Then a tall young lady entered the room with a long cigarette-holder, saying in a sonorous low voice: ‘How do you do, Mr Chaplin. I suppose I am the only person in the world who hasn’t seen you on the screen.’

I grinned and nodded.

Iris looked Scandinavian, with blonde bobbed hair, snub nose and light blue eyes. She was then eighteen years old, very attractive with a bloom of Mayfair sophistication about her, having had a book of her poems published at the age of fifteen.

‘Constance speaks so much about you,’ she said.

I grinned and nodded again.

Eventually, Sir Herbert returned, announcing that Constance could not come as she had been delayed with costume fittings, and that we would dine without her.

Dear God! With these strangers how would I endure the night? With this burning thought in my mind, we left the room in silence and entered the lift in silence and in silence entered the dining-room and sat at table as though we had just returned from a funeral.

Poor Sir Herbert and Iris did their best to make conversation. Soon she gave up and just sat back scanning the dining-room. If only the food would come, eating might relieve my awful tension.… Father and daughter conversed a little and talked about the South of France, Rome and Salzburg – had I ever been there? Had I ever seen any of Max Reinhardt’s productions?

I shook my head apologetically.

Tree now surveyed me. ‘You know, you should travel.’

I told him that I had little time for that, then I came to: ‘Look, Sir Herbert, my success has been so sudden that I have had little time to catch up with it. But as a boy of fourteen I saw you as Svengali, as Fagin, as Anthony, as Falstaff, some of them many times, and ever since you have been my idol. I never thought of you as existing off-stage. You were a legend. And to be dining with you tonight in Los Angeles overwhelms me.’

Tree was touched. ‘Really!’ he kept repeating. ‘Really!’

From that night on we became very good friends. He would call me up occasionally and the three of us, Iris, Sir Herbert and I, would dine together. Sometimes Constance would come along, and we would go to Victor Hugo’s restaurant and muse over our coffee and listen to sentimental chamber music.

*

From Constance I had heard much about Douglas Fairbanks’s charm and ability, not only as a personality but as a brilliant after-dinner speaker. In those days I disliked brilliant young men – especially after-dinner speakers. However, a dinner was arranged at his house.

Both Douglas and I tell a story of that night. Before going I had made excuses to Constance that I was ill, but she would have none of it. So I made up my mind to feign a headache and leave early. Fairbanks said that he was also nervous, and that when the door-bell rang he quickly descended into the basement, where there was a billiard-table, and began playing pool. That night was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

It was not for naught that Douglas captured the imagination and love of the public. The spirit of his pictures, their optimism and infallibility, were very much to the American taste, and indeed to the taste of the whole world. He had extraordinary
magnetism and charm and a genuine boyish enthusiasm which he conveyed to the public. As I began to know him intimately I found him disarmingly honest because he admitted that he enjoyed being a snob and that successful people had allure for him.

Although Doug was tremendously popular, he generously praised other people’s talent and was modest about his own. He often said that Mary Pickford and I had genius, while he had only a small talent. This of course was not so; Douglas was creative and did things in a big way.

He built a ten-acre set for
Robin Hood
, a castle with enormous ramparts and drawbridges, far bigger than any castle that ever existed. With great pride Douglas showed me the huge drawbridge. ‘Magnificent,’ I said. ‘What a wonderful opening for one of my comedies: the drawbridge comes down, and I put out the cat and take in the milk.’

He had a varied assortment of friends, ranging from cowboys to kings, and found interesting qualities in them all. His friend Charlie Mack, a cowboy, a glib, verbose fellow, was highly amusing to Douglas. While we were at dinner, Charlie would frame himself in the doorway and talk: ‘Nice place yer got here, Doug,’ then looking around the dining-room: ‘Only it’s too far to spit from the table to the fireplace.’ Then he would crouch on his heels and tell us about his wife suing him for ‘di-vorce’ on grounds of ‘cruler-ty’. ‘I says, Judge, that woman has more cruler-ty in her little finger than I have in ma whole body. And no baby ever toted a gun more than that gal did. She’d have me a-hopping and a-dodging behind that ole tree of ours till it was that perforated yer could see thru it!’ I had an idea that Charlie’s fanfaronade was rehearsed before visiting Doug.

Douglas’s house had been a shooting lodge, a rather ugly two-storey bungalow set on a hill in the centre of what was then the scrubby, barren hills of Beverly. The alkali and the sagebrush gave off an odorous, sour tang that made the throat dry and the nostrils smart.

In those days Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lamp-posts with white globes adorned empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revellers from roadhouses.

Douglas Fairbanks was the first film star to live in Beverly Hills, and often invited me to stay the week-end with him. At night from my bedroom I would listen to the coyotes howling, packs of them invading the garbage cans. Their howls were eerie, like the pealing of little bells.

He always had two or three stooges staying with him: Tom Geraghty, who wrote his scripts, Carl, an ex-Olympic athlete, and a couple of cowboys. Tom, Doug and I had a Three Musketeers relationship.

On Sunday morning Doug would organize a posse of cowponies and we would get up in the dark and ride over the hills to meet the dawn. The cowboys would stake the horses and make a camp-fire and prepare breakfast of coffee, hot cakes and ‘sowbelly’. While we watched the dawn break, Doug would wax eloquent and I would joke about loss of sleep and argue that the only dawn worth seeing was with the opposite sex. Nevertheless, those early morning sorties were romantic. Douglas was the only man who could ever get me on a horse, in spite of my complaints that the world over-sentimentalized the beast and that it was mean and cantankerous with the mind of a half-wit.

At that time he was separated from his first wife. In the evening he would have friends to dinner, including Mary Pickford, of whom he was terrifically enamoured. They both acted like frightened rabbits about it. I used to advise them not to marry but just to live together and get it out of their systems, but they could not agree with my unconventional ideas. I had spoken so strongly against their marrying that when in the end they did so all their friends were invited to the wedding but me.

In those days Douglas and I often indulged in cliché philosophizing, and I would hold forth on the futility of life. Douglas believed that our lives were ordained and that our destiny was important. When Douglas was possessed with this mystic ebullience it usually had a cynical effect on me. I remember one warm summer’s night both of us climbed to the top of a large water-tank and sat there talking in the wild grandeur of Beverly. The stars were mysteriously brilliant and the moon incandescent, and I had been saying that life was without reason.

‘Look!’ said Douglas, fervently, making an arc gesture
taking in all the heavens. ‘The moon! And those myriads of stars! Surely there must be a reason for all this beauty? It must be fulfilling some destiny! It must be for some good and you and I are all part of it!’ Then he turned to me, suddenly inspired. ‘Why are you given this talent, this wonderful medium of motion pictures that reaches millions of people throughout the world?’

‘Why is it given to Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers?’ I said. And Douglas laughed.

Douglas was incurably romantic. When spending week-ends with him I was sometimes awakened at three in the morning out of a sound sleep, and would see through the mist a Hawaiian orchestra playing on the lawn, serenading Mary. It was charming, but it was difficult to enter into the spirit of it when one was not personally involved. But these boyish attributes made him endearing.

Douglas was also the sportive type who had wolf-hounds and police dogs perched on the back seat of his open Cadillac. He genuinely liked that sort of thing.

*

Hollywood was fast becoming the Mecca of writers, actors and intellectuals. Celebrated authors came from all parts of the world: Sir Gilbert Parker, William J. Locke, Rex Beach, Joseph Hergesheimer, Somerset Maugham, Gouverneur Morris, Ibañez, Elinor Glyn, Edith Wharton, Kathleen Norris and many others.

Somerset Maugham never worked in Hollywood, though his stories were much in demand. He did, however, stay there a number of weeks prior to going to the South Sea islands, where he wrote those admirable short stories. At dinner he recounted one to Douglas and me, the story of
Sadie Thompson
, which he said was based on actual fact, and which was later dramatized as
Rain
. I have always considered
Rain
a model play. The Reverend Davidson and his wife are beautifully defined characters – more interesting than Sadie Thompson. How superb Tree would have been as the Reverend Davidson! He would have played him as gentle, ruthless, oily and terrifying.

Set in this Hollywood milieu was a fifth-rate, rambling, barnlike establishment known as the Hollywood Hotel. It had
bounced into prominence like a bewildered country maiden bequeathed a fortune. Rooms were at a premium, only because the road from Los Angeles to Hollywood was almost impassable and these literary celebrities wanted to live in the vicinity of the studios. But everyone looked lost, as though they had come to the wrong address.

Elinor Glyn occupied two bedrooms there, converting one into a sitting-room by covering pillows with pastel-coloured material and spreading them over the bed to look like a sofa. Here she entertained her guests.

I first met Elinor when she gave a dinner for ten people. We were to meet in her rooms for cocktails before going into the dining-room and I was the first to arrive. ‘Ah,’ she said, cupping my face with her hands and gazing intently at me. ‘Let me have a good look at you. How extraordinary! I thought your eyes were brown, but they’re quite blue.’ Though she was a little overwhelming at first, I became very fond of her.